[RndTbl] Climate change is messing with GPS time-keeping!
Adam Thompson
athompso at athompso.net
Thu Aug 5 17:03:33 CDT 2021
Gilbert didn't propose any such thing, he reported on what he read AND
PROVIDED HIS SOURCES.
The twitter thread linked goes on to reference a GitLab discussion about
Linux's gpsd daemon and a fix to deal with some upcoming problems.
The Gary Miller who originally mentioned a connection to climate change
in the GitLab thread is "the GPS and PPS guy" on the NTPSec project.
While I don't know that any of the people cited, indirectly or not, are
necessarily a worldwide authority on geodetic science, I do trust that
they know a lot more about it, particularly as it relates to
timekeeping, than I do.
Quick googling reveals that we haven't needed any of the
previously-expected leap seconds since 2016 due to a small increase in
the earth's rotational speed:
* https://www.timeanddate.com/time/negative-leap-second.html
* https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-faster-rotation.html
*
https://www.masterclock.com/company/masterclock-inc-blog/will-we-have-a-negative-leap-second
Regardless of any connection to climate change, that's worth knowing if
you run a high-stratum NTP server. Or a buggy GPS receiver, for that
matter... :-(
And supposedly (if I knew what on earth I was looking at!) here's the
raw data showing the increase in the earth's rotational speed:
* https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxiv-030.txt
Nothing I could find in ~5 minutes of searching either substantiated OR
refuted the supposed link between climate change and the earth's
rotation, so, please, cite anything you can find, pro OR con. Yes, it's
a stretch, but that claim came from a - literal - worldwide expert on
certain aspects of timekeeping, who presumably read or heard it
somewhere he thought was reliable.
-Adam
On 2021-08-05 15:31, Daulton wrote:
> Hi Gilbert,
>
> How is it you propose that "climate change" is actually speeding up
> the rotation of the earth? This seems like a very long stretch of an
> assertion. According to other sources, "the speed of the Earth’s
> rotation varies constantly due to the motion of its molten core,
> oceans and atmosphere, as well as the effect of celestial bodies such
> as the Moon".
>
> Daulton
>
> On Thursday, August 05, 2021 14:44 CDT, "Gilbert E. Detillieux"
> <gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
>
>> For those of you who took in Wyatt's May presentation on setting up a
>> GPS-based NTP server,...
>>
>> https://muug.ca/meetings/20-21.html#may
>>
>> ... you may be interested in this bit of weirdness...
>>
>> https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1422163289518313474?s=21
>> TIL: Climate change has resulted in the earth spinning faster,
>> cancelling out leap seconds.
>>
>> “As I previously said, the reason it will affect live GPS is due to,
>> and
>> I hate to say it, global warming causing the earth to speed up,
>> unexpectedly.”
>>
>> So, now you know!... :)
>>
>> Gilbert
>>
>> --
>> Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
>> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
>> University of Manitoba
>> Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2
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>
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